


Tell Me Something Secret

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Conversations, M/M, no prior knowledge necessary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-24 17:26:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6161017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A newcomer to the caped community has made it clear that they're not willing to wait around for Joker to politely off himself in his own good time. Batman's intervention is, unfortunately, necessary. Discussion ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Something Secret

**Author's Note:**

> aesthetically this draws heavily on the games, but it actually has nothing to do with the events of the games

Up ahead, you can see him standing on the hood of a car, his lanky silhouette perfectly visible even through the tinted windows of the batmobile. As always, it’s as if there’s a spotlight following him—even directing his goons in a tunnel underneath the bay, he seems to be performing for an unseen audience, his exaggerated gestures a perfect match for the old fashioned miming of silent films. You find it difficult to watch those, now, when every stroke of body language reminds you of him. But this isn’t the time to brood too deeply on any of that.

You skid to a stop in front of him, wheels dragging half circles into the pavement,  just as the car chasing you crests the entrance to the tunnel. They’re a long way behind, but their headlights ripple on the cement walls. It will be a matter of moments before they are close enough to make good on their threats. This has to happen fast.

“You’re early,” Joker announces, his narrowed eyes fixing on you. “Don’t you know that’s bad manners?”

The ever-less-distant engine rumbles behind you. You clamber up onto the roof of your own car and launch yourself at him, land crouched in a flare of cape over him as he trips backwards in his haste to get away. No time for niceties. You grab him by the throat and drag him down. He comes away struggling, kicking and clawing to little effect, as you manhandle him into the passenger’s seat of the batmobile. He goes for something in his pockets. You grab the roof of the car and kick hard, throwing nearly your full weight into his ribcage.

While he’s gasping and wheezing, you spare a second to look up at his goons, all of them frozen and wide-eyed in an array around you.

“Evacuate,” you snap. “Right now."

A box of lightbulbs slips right out of one set of hands, shattering on the floor.

You slam your palm onto the roof of the car, producing a noise that makes every body in the tunnel flinch in unison. “Get out of here!” you shout.

They do. In the midst of the growing rumble and the nervous frenzy of evacuating clowns, you throw yourself into the driver’s seat and seal the door shut. There’s no time to do much more than put a little distance between yourselves and the oncoming car—you shut off the air flow from the outside even as you punch the ignition, because you’ve got a pretty good idea what’s coming.

The flash of headlights. Mechanical roaring, crates and plastic blockades shattering under impact. You fly down the length of the tunnel, and you begin to think you just might have a shot at outrunning this, when the world behind you goes white hot with a fire that swallows everything. Even inside the car, the _boom_ is deafening. Your hands strain against the wheel, gripping too hard, but power steering gives way under the gale of superheated air and you spin out, clipping a support pillar.

The light recedes. You turn off the engine systems, the headlights, everything except the sealing protocol. Let them think you’re out for the count. They won’t know precisely what you’ve done or where you’ve gone—if they’re arrogant enough to think they’ve killed you as well as their intended target, so much the better. You’re so caught up in your calculations that you make a potentially fatal error. You forget about Joker.

Something sharp—the dulled tip of a well used blade, you suspect—presses into your cheek. You register a momentary relief that you haven’t been summarily stabbed for your incaution. Any damage here will be cosmetic, if unfortunate.

“Was that for _me?”_ Joker asks you, in the lightly concerned tones of a PTA mother. Helen, you think. He reminds you of Helen, who used to bring the lemon bars.

“New vigilante,” you say. “Yes, that was meant for you.”

The knifepoint disappears. “So you swooped in to save me,” Joker says, “like the daring do-gooder you are. Very dramatic, by the way.” He leans forward, presses a hand against your chest. “My hero.”

“I can’t permit a murder in cold blood,” you reply, trying your hardest to shut down this discussion before it can bloom into something familiar and awful. “Especially by someone who’s trying to become a force for good.”

Joker snorts and settles back and hits the recline button on his seat—has he really been inside this vehicle enough times to know where that is? You tally up every instance in your head and don’t like the answer.  

“Uhuh,” he says. “But you can let all my boys get fried, no problem.”

You say nothing.

“No no,” he goes on, “it’s _fine_ , I won’t hold it against you. Mooks are a dime a dozen in this town. I’m just wondering…” he looks at you, pupils blown in the darkness. “How you’re gonna justify saving me, but not them.”

“I only had time to take one person,” you say, even as you know you’re playing right into his nimble, gloved hands.

The emergency lights of the tunnel soak everything in a hazy green, green like his hair and eyes, green like no natural thing on this earth. In the wash of monochrome he almost looks like a normal person, a soft and delicate human body perhaps too skinny to be healthy. He almost looks like he could be any given civilian snatched off the street under duress. You shut that line of thought down, but the echo of uneasiness lingers in its wake.

“Why not Bobby?” Joker asks, testing the edge of his knife against his thumb. “Bobby’s got a family, you know. Grandma’s sick in the hospital. I let him off work sometimes to go see the old biddy.”

He’s baiting you. Of course he’s baiting you—you can’t possibly know all his henchmen or their circumstances, and if he wants you to believe he’d ever do anything out of the goodness of his heart then he vastly overestimates your optimism.

“Or Djanen,” he says. “Djanen lost his house, yannow, turned to crime. I picked him up while he was living on park benches and eating out of dumpsters.”

“I warned them to evacuate,” you grit out.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Joker says. He smiles at you. “I wonder how many of them managed to outrun that big happy ball of fire your buddy shot at them.”

You are not going to eject him bodily from the batmobile, but you can admit to yourself that it would probably make you feel better.

He shifts onto his side, pillowing his sharp cheek onto the crook of his elbow. It’s… intimate. It’s as if he’s lying on your bed late in the evening, thinking idly about staying the night.

“So here we are,” he says, with a canny, smug look that says he’s reading your mind, “alone in the dark, all cozy under thousands of tons of water and dirt.”

You think about those thousands of tons. You think about how you’ve basically come to sit with him in a sprawling tomb, buried under the earth. Isolated. _Maybe they’ll bury us together_ , he once said to you. You wouldn’t like to admit how that passing quip has haunted you ever since. The two of you in some unmarked grave together, a pair of skeletons with your rusting weapons and your bared rib cages biting into each other... If you die as Bruce Wayne, well, there's the grounds with your mother and father. But a part of you imagines it even then, as if the world might find it fitting to throw him down with you in the wet earth, like a final condemnation.

“So,” he says. “Tell me a secret.”

He’s laid himself out unguarded and languid on the reclined seat, his eyelids lowered, perfectly aware that there’s nothing you can do to him unless he fires the first shot. He spends so much of his time antagonizing you that you sometimes forget he knows your rules by heart, knows exactly how to hold a stalemate if he so chooses. You find yourself wanting to relax into that peace, and unnerved by how easily that desire creeps over you.

“A secret,” you say.

“A secret,” he agrees. He gestures lazily with the knife, pointing its solid tip in your general direction. “You wanted me to live, didn’t you.”

This again. You draw back, squaring your shoulders more firmly against the backrest.

“Oh don’t clam up now,” he sighs, rolling onto his back. He throws an arm across his eyes. “Come back to me. We were almost there.”

You glance at him out of the corner of your eye. If he were anyone else, you’d say he was genuinely put out. There’s a little bit of honest distress in his voice. But of course, even if it’s real, it’s only because you’re not going where he wants you.

“Look,” he says, peering out from under his arm, his eyes all in shadow, “it’s only us, isn’t it? I won’t tell. Do I look like the kind of guy who spreads secrets around?”

“Yes,” you say, without looking at him.

“Okay, you got me,” he says. “But it’s nothing I don’t already say. Come on, Bats. Batsy. B-man. Are you afraid of the answer? Are you afraid to say it out loud?” There’s a thoughtful pause. “But which answer are you afraid of?”

You’d like to tell him it’s not a question of _fear_. And it’s not the answer that worries you as much as the question itself. But if you start down that road, he'll never let you leave it.

“Here,” he says, removing his arm all at once. “I’ll tell you something secret.”

“If you’re not going to tell me how you keep getting out of Arkham,” you say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“My secret is,” he says, patiently ignoring you, “I want you to live.”

“Then it might help if you stopped trying to kill me,” you reply. You’re not interested in his pretense of friendliness.

“Oh no no. If no one is trying to kill you, how can you live?”

“With a lot less difficulty,” you retort.

“I want to see you _survive_ ,” he tells you, bringing up his hands to mime releasing something, although what you couldn’t say. “I want to see you broken and bloodied and crawling out of the wreckage, _gloriously_ alive. I want to know that every time your heart beats—” he turns his head, his eyes burning twin holes into your armor, “—it’s because you were _better_.”

You finally, reluctantly, give him the whole of your attention. It’s impossible to know when he’s lying—you think sometimes he doesn’t even know, doesn’t care to know—but something in your gut tells you this is more than idle chatter. Is it the look he’s giving you? If he could, he looks like he might swallow you whole.

If that's what he wants, does he want it for his sake, or for yours? You've never been able to tell if you're anything but an object or an obstacle to him, for all that he likes to claim a kind of dementedly tender bond when it suits him. You wonder if it could be real to him, after all, and if so—is this his idea of kindness?

“You live in spite of me,” he says. “You live to spite me.”

“I don’t—” you say, “—I don’t live to _spite_ you.”

“Don’t you?” he asks, fluttering his lashes.

You have survived falling buildings, blood loss, chemical burns, fumes, physical beatings, and a hundred other kinds of pain you hesitate to list only because the list would take _too_ _long_. It matters very little to you. Survival only means another day of the same struggle, which you love, and hate, and will eventually make your grave upon. If anything, you have made sure that _he_ lives to spite himself. You have pulled him from wreckage, fumes, beatings—every kind of end imaginable—because he doesn’t seem to _want_ you too. It’s your job to make sure he lives.

When did that become your job? Maybe it always has been.

“I do,” you say.

He stretches, smiling, like a cat luxuriating in the golden warmth of sudden sunshine. You don’t bother to tell him that you’re not answering the question he thinks you are. You’re answering the first question, the secret question.

A secret answer for a secret question.


End file.
